Chapter 33
CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE
Thousands of peasants stormed Paris’s Tuileries Palace, singing “La Carmagnole” as they forced Louis XVI and his consorts to flee the palace.
—Muster Brach, from his speech “Historical Precedent”
Cassius and I slowly descended the Abyssal Steps.
Against the silky darkness, I held up my Zippo, which gave us just enough light to watch our footing.
We continued down past the doorway into the Modern Stratum, where the stairway changed from concrete to thick tongue-and-groove hardwood.
The steps smelled of dusty oak and creaked beneath our feet as we followed their winding descent around a space roughly the size of a coffin.
Memory started to press my head like a bench clamp . . .
. . . Dad takes down every picture of Mama, puts them in his closet, then looks me in the eye. “She’s gone, Jack. And I can’t baby you like she did. You have to choose, too.” Then he leaves . . .
My father rarely spoke to me after that, and even when he did it wasn’t the same. I hadn’t thought about that in a long time. The deeper I went into the Strata the deeper the memories that resurfaced.
In my shadow cast by the flickering Zippo, I saw a bright amber vein snaking away from the large black scar inside me. I didn’t bother with my elastics or humming this time and pushed ahead.
It wasn’t long before the dark began to recede, and I could see a red arch-topped four-panel door ahead.
It had a brass lion-faced knocker and center handle.
I traced the Who quote and pushed it open into a storage room filled with racks of costumes, piles of old playbills, and crudely painted stage scenery—trees, wagons, horses.
We moved toward a door on the far side and pulled it open on an empty music hall, the kind of place Gilbert and Sullivan might have played.
Light from high windows shone down in broad stripes, illuminating a faint grey haze.
Across the wooden floor were maybe a dozen empty tables, a piano near the stage, and a bar against the far wall.
The other walls were mostly bare—I missed the pictures Henry dressed the place with topside.
An upper balcony ran along the back and down both sides.
The scent of stale beer and spent cigarettes hung in the air.
The clacking of typewriters echoed toward us from an open door near the front. I shared a look with Cassius and we started toward it. Only two steps, and I staggered into one of the tables. My head was throbbing. I bent over, thinking I might be sick.
“Do we need to find you some of your music?” Cassius asked. “Let’s hope there’s something on the way.”
We passed through the door and found ourselves in an office. People sat at desks typing or stood at chalkboards making notes. A man in the back of the room was printing broadsides on a large wood press with a crank and piling them on a table.
“There are empty typewriters over there,” a woman said to us as she bustled past. In her hands she held a ream of blank paper. “Just copy the letter next to the typewriter. When you have a handful, go out and get them signed by anyone who’ll do so.”
“What is this place?” I asked.
The woman did an about-face. “Under normal circumstances, we publish music. Today, however, we’re endeavoring to submit a petition to the Strata Chancery by day’s end. We need them to fight back against this new brand of tyranny being peddled by Muster Brach and his cohorts.”
I rubbed at my aching temples, trying to square that with Brach’s plan. “But isn’t Brach fighting to save the Strata? Protect your ability to progress and move on?”
“Yes, but so that he may regulate that progress, direct it how he sees fit. Just as he seeks to regulate what music we may play in our hall. We are one of the few venues left in the Strata that allows anything other than Brach’s music. And that is due mainly to the protections of the ward.”
From what I could make of the notes on the chalkboard they’d been at it for several weeks and were trying to get ten thousand signatures, but had only 217.
The woman pivoted back around and sat at a desk, her fingers beginning to fly on her typewriter. I bent over to read the petition, catching a bit about xenophobia and the dangers of propaganda, before the clacking of typewriters became too much for my pounding head and I dashed outside for air.
Cassius came up beside me. “You do not look well.” “I’ll live. Lead the way.”
He pointed southeast. “Seven Dials.”
We wove our way down Castle Street—Charing Cross in the world above—and cut left on New Compton Street, no such road topside anymore.
The streets were all lit with guttering gas lamps.
Smoke billowed from distant factories in dark, thick plumes, covering the city in a gritty smog.
Looking at the soot-filled sky, I almost forgot I was somehow down in the earth.
We crossed a few makeshift boardwalks laid over broad trenches. Down in the ditches, workers shoveled mud, probably for sewer and rail lines. In the dimness, I could see a few of their semblance candles burning on the ground next to the ditches.
We turned southeast onto a narrow street called Great White Lion—Mercer Street topside—and entered St. Giles Rookery. The smell of rotting fish, horse crap, and body odor swirled in the air. I dashed into a short alley to puke—doing so helped my head a little.
Then Cassius led me deeper into the rookery’s maze of alleys and hidden courts and yards.
Men, women, and children crawled up from cellars, while others skulked inside thin shadows.
Chimney-sweep kids sat on the edges of rooftops, dangling their legs and looking down at passersby.
Costermongers, peddling wounded and molding fruits and vegetables, rolled their rattling carts down the dirt road, singing out their wares and prices.
Among the small clusters of people, I heard several languages I didn’t recognize, though most spoke English with an almost incomprehensible Irish brogue.
Lank fellows circled women tricked out in lace, flattering and fawning but apparently without the coin to seal a transaction.
A few paces away, women with blackened eyes and missing teeth offered companionship for gin or bread.
And more than one man stood in soiled black robes barking scripture passages as if they were catchphrases.
“Five’ll getcha ten, says the Lord our God, amen,” cried one blackcoat, shaking a pair of dice in his loose fist.
The gutters were filled with beggars and half-naked street folk offering to do anything for a halfpenny. One fake beggar stood and pickpocketed a man who insulted him as he walked by. Down more than one blind alley, men were fighting or mugging or pissing.
Soon, the bitter tang of gin began to cut through the stench of perfume, unwashed bodies, and garlic.
“Gin lane,” Cassius announced as we turned onto Ivy Lane, where gin houses lined the street. “Seven Dials is one thing, Jack, but gin lane . . . there are no protections here. Even raptorials will only enter this place in pairs.”
“That bad?”
“It is, as you say, a mean street. Make good choices and our odds are almost half.”
We navigated a labyrinth of twists and turns down the crowded road to a dilapidated clapboard building with a faded sign that read: rats castle.
“It used to be a hospital for lepers,” Cassius said. “Now it’s a padding ken—a flash house for footpads, tramps, and housebreakers.”
“This where we’ll find your ‘reprobate’ friend?” Cassius nodded.
Ahead of us a line of men in shackles were being marched up a short flight of steps into the ramshackle edifice by a couple of bobbies carrying billy clubs. We followed them in.
A few gas lamps dimly illuminated a sweaty bar thick with tobacco smoke and the stench of bitters.
A fiddler played in the corner, his bow desperately in need of rosin.
A line of men, women, and children queued toward the far side of the room, where a man sat behind a table.
His clothes were deeply soiled, but he wore a bright red kerchief around his neck and a derby hat cocked at a rakish angle.
A lit pipe smoldered in a brass tray next to him, beside it a ledger where he made notes after each transaction.
And behind him stood a tall set of shelves filled with various items, including khopesh knives, and a couple of lanterns.
“What’ll it be, Mick?” one of the bobbies called to the man behind the table.
“Unhook ’em,” said Mick,“and get ’em a bowl of St. Giles for their troubles.” The officers unchained the prisoners, found them a table to sit at, and called for bowls of stew. Then they crossed to the table where the guy in the derby handed each bobby a couple of copper coins.
“Once they’re rum-dum,” Mick added, “let ’em know there’ll be no Tyburn rope for their necks today. Then after they’ve eaten, take ’em on to our Shiguan friends at the Guildhall. Not in the tumbrel. Let ’em walk like free men.”
The bobbies went about it, and Mick turned his attention back to the line slumping forward toward him.
A boy stepped forward, his pants damp and brown and reeking of sewage. He dropped some odd bits of iron and thread on the table.
“Orphan tosher with a handful of crap,” said Mick with a chuckle. “It’s information I’m selling, Uncle,” said the boy.
Mick rolled his hand. “Go on, then.”
“Folks what live in the drains and workhouses”—the boy lifted his chin—“don’t all see salvation in Shiguan doings. And they’ve started learning to use iron and thread.”
“An uprising inside an uprising, then,” said Mick with a wink. “I’ll warn the knickerbockers. Milk and bread’s in the kitchen.”
The kid dashed off as Mick made a note in his ledger, and an elderly woman slouched forward and untied a shawl. An assortment of bones clacked onto the table.
“A bag of upright bones comes to me a bone grubber,” said Mick, sighing. “Old women slouch unchallenged in topside cemeteries,” said the woman. “And you can be glad of it. These bones was Emmeline
Pankhurst’s, they was.”
Mick laughed. “The suffragette? You think my buyers want to let the women vote?”
“Your buyers, Uncle,” said the woman, “want revolutionaries. And by that measure, potent bones are these. As I hears it, she’s still setting fires up Parliament way.”
Mick’s eyes glinted as he touched an old yellow jawbone.
“Pork stew. Two bowls for your trouble. Next.” He made another note in his ledger.
When I was six, my dad gave me an old, rusted wagon.
It was the first present I could remember him giving me.
But it turned out he wanted me to drag it around the neighborhood, collecting cans and bottles.
Redeem them for him. Said I’d be safe from getting jumped because of my age. He was wrong.
I started toward the table. Cassius patted me on the shoulder and cut into line. A half dozen ragged, scar-faced men leapt from their chairs to intercept him, daggers up.
Mick looked up from his junk-laden table with a wide, yellow-toothed grin. “Cassius, my good friend! Let ’im through, will ya? But watch his friend. Him we don’t know.”
The ragged men inched back to their seats. All save one, whom Mick motioned over and whispered in his ear. The guy nodded and ducked down the back hall out of sight.
“Welcome to Little Ireland,” said Mick, mostly to me. “Or as we like to call it, the Holy Land. And I’m the king rat, don’t you know? King of the beggars.”
“It is good to see you, Mick,” said Cassius.
“From anyone else that’d be a lie.” Mick took up his pipe from the tray and puffed it deeply. “From you, my friend, it’s practically enough to coax me onto a reformer’s couch, mend me woe-begotten ways.”
Mick stood, and he and Cassius exchanged a firm forearm grasp. Then he looked not at me but at my shadow. “You’re towing a new thread-binder, Cassius.”
“Jack Solomon.” I put my hand out. “Glad to meet you.”
“Stupid thing to say until you know who I am.” Mick took my hand. “But I’ve never missed a chance yet to shake hands with a dead man.”